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The reality of most MSP Marketing Companies:
Every single MSP has wondered whether they should hire an MSP marketing company at some point. Marketing is tough, especially in this space. Cliché but most MSP marketing owners are not marketers! They want someone else to handle marketing their business. They want the leads lined up for them so they can knock them down and close the sale.
An MSP marketing company is going to know how to post good blogs, make your website look awesome, post consistently on your social media, setup email marketing (usually cold), and give you some recommendations and ideas. If you’re lucky they’re even going to have experience running effective ads to build on top of these pieces.
They’re going to talk about their awesome process and how it works to provide consistent leads.
You’re likely going to sign up on the hype. They WILL execute on the things I mentioned above. You WILL be doing more than you have been doing which is great!
The unfortunate reality of marketing an MSP is it takes a lot of time to make an impact on your local market. Consistently posting on your social media with a few hundred followers is NOT going to move the needle. It’s not.
Cold emailing might help, and you might get some leads here and there, but not what you were expecting.
Your website is going to look awesome! But how are people going to find it? Is your marketing company also managing your SEO? How do you know? What keywords are they targeting? Do they provide reports? The answer is usually a big NO.
I’m really not trying to trash MSP marketing companies. I believe they have their place. However, this is not the most effective way to grow your MSP. Trust me. I’ve lived it.
Our Story
At our MSP, the owner worked with a reputable MSP marketing company for years. Again, they did the work, but they didn’t produce leads. At least not consistent leads that made much of an impact.
He hired me while I was still in graduate school and had no idea what I was doing. I knew nothing about IT or marketing. Yet, he gave me a shot. Seven years later, we went from 3 people in a warehouse to a 27 employee MSP in a state of the art data center.
What changed?
He hired someone that could put in way more time marketing his business than an outsourced marketing company.
I can assure you I’m not special, I just had the time to commit to building out a marketing foundation and consistently execute on a marketing strategy. Anyone can have the same impact if they have a plan.
Here’s an example:
We have The Ultimate MSP Marketing Guide built for marketing owners/marketing managers that outlines the steps they should be consistently taking to grow the business. If you were to actually execute on each of these steps, it would take 10-20 hours per week.
There is not a marketing company on the planet that is going to dedicate that type of time to growing your business. I guarantee it.
However, that’s only a part time marketing coordinator if you hire in-house.
When the owner of Alltek Services brought me on, we didn’t have guides or content to help. It was just YouTube university. We built MSP camp specifically to help MSPs that are ready to actually get results from their marketing without wasting their money.
When SHOULD you use an MSP marketing company?
Many MSP Marketing companies have a lot of knowledge and are usually great at what they do. The issue is time. They can only dedicate so much time to your account, just like you can only dedicate so much time to your managed clients. So, they take a blanket approach and do the same thing for MOST of their clients. Squeaky wheel and all of that.
Working with specialists will always be advised. You may not do SEO in-house. You may not have a graphic designer on staff. You may need to hire a videographer to get some excellent content for your campaign. You will need to outsource. That’s a fact.
However, when you have a coordinator or manager, you have someone pushing the ball forward and managing the right vendors to execute on your overall strategy. Strategy and creative should mostly come form you and your team. Then, you will outsource certain pieces to move the ship forward. Get an ROI on your organic in-house marketing FIRST, then begin to add budget and specialties to the mix.
Here’s another example:
We now have a team of 3 on the marketing team and we still outsource certain aspects, such as motion animation and SEO. We are just now getting more comfortable with bringing SEO in-house. For example, how did you land on this blog? Was it a Google/Bing Search? Most likely the answer is yes. Why did I write this specific article?
- I do feel like I’m well equipped to answer this question because I’m living it right now
- “MSP Marketing Company” is being searched a lot on Google and surprisingly competition was low
There are tons of opportunities like this for your MSP, but if you’re completely relying on an MSP marketing company to find these opportunities for you, you’ll be disappointed.
Another example is our Facebook advertising. We have a sophisticated Facebook funnel in place. Did I build it? Nope. I hired a specialist at $100 an hour to help me build it. We check in about once a month to optimize and refine. I’ll take that all day over hiring a marketing company that is good at everything but not great at anything.
So, what should you do?
- Don’t start with hiring an MSP Marketing Company. Trust me. This will put you back years.
- Jump on our Free Guides page and download the ultimate Guide and How to Hire a marketing intern.
- Listen (or have you’re intern/coordinator) to the No Fluff MSP Marketing Podcast and you’ll have everything you need to start adding MRR to your MSP
- Reach out if you have questions or need any help!
